The Classical Guitar

        I often ask myself.... why did I take up a hobby that demands several hours of practice, cost me pots of hard earned money and very little hope of success? The classical guitar has been my constant companion for the last ten years. An affliction, more than a hobby. I have gone through many ups and downs with this beautiful instrument. Where did it all begin?

 The story goes like this. My son Chathu (aka Vasudev Nayar) got this guitar bug when he was in school. The sight of long-haired rock singers jumping with sleek guitars, setting the stage ablaze must have sparked interest in him to learn the instrument. We bought him an acoustic guitar for his birthday. We dropped in at a Music Institute  near our home. We met Peter, our first instructor. We discussed a little bit about guitars and I told him about how I played in a small town rock band ages ago and also that I could passably play some chords. I also told him that my dream was to play fingerstyle and tried learning it from Youtube but got nowhere with it.

         After the second or third session, he saw me waiting in my car to pick up my son. He asked why don't you join the class? Classical guitar is what I teach, which is much advanced, he said and also that fingerstyle is just something which comes naturally if you play classical guitar. I was very apprehensive about the idea. A 48 year old man learning an instrument with his 15 year old son sounded downright hilarious. 

   Anyway I threw my hat in the ring. Peter taught me to read music well. Something which I attempted on my own several times in the past and failed. I took the Trinity Theory exams first. Chathu  and I progressed up to Grade 5 exam of Trinity College of London. Chathu lost interest and he dropped out in the midst of challenges of getting into some professional college.

   I plodded on. The thing with me is, I practice a lot, but when I am asked to perform before the examiner, I get the heejeebeejees. And the Trinity examiner is often an elderly Caucasian male or female who don't take very kindly to old upstarts like me. In my workplace I often have to give speeches from among any three languages that I am fluent in. I can do that with a straight face without batting an eyelid. But when it comes to performing with the classical guitar before the Trinity examiner, it is another story altogether.

   Now about the classical guitar, it looks and feels like any ordinary steel-stringed acoustic guitar. The difference lies in the strings, construction and style of playing. Nylon strings are used instead of steel strings. The material is similar but it is constructed differently. The fretboard in wider. The guitar itself is held at an angle of 45 degrees close to the chest of the player. Not a very stylish thing to do and could dash the hopes of those who try to play like Van Helen. This posture is often achieved by using a footstool to raise the left leg and placing the guitar on the left thigh. (I use a whole lot of contraptions to avoid using the footstool since it gives me back pain)The four fingers of the left hand are used to press the notes on various frets. The trick lies in the nails in  right hand. The thumb and three other fingers (except the pinky ), or rather the nails of these fingers, are used to play the strings. While in the steel stringed acoustic guitar, often a plectrum is used or a fingerstyle guitarist may use the flesh on the fingers of right hand to hit the strings, in Classical guitar, nails are used to play the strings. Often I wonder whether it was intended to be a woman's hobby. So nail management is the key. An elderly male who regularly files and polishes his nails can be a sight that evokes much curiosity. And in my professional life I have to shake hands a lot. (the pandemic has saved me that trouble) I would often worry about my nails scratching the other persons hands. I also refuse to do the dishes to help the Missus at home since it might get my nails dirty

       If a nail breaks, it would mean that your practice is interrupted for the next fifteen days. So it has been a tough journey. I also have to put up with friends who ask me to play Hindi songs on the classical guitar .....in spite of the fact that my guitar journey is a closely held secret in my professional circles. But three years back, I got myself a silent classical guitar. It has only a frame and no wooden box. You have to plug in a headphone, switch on the electricals and practice. I started keeping the silent guitar in office and practice for about 20 minutes after lunch. Helps me de-stress and forget about all the pettiness at the workplace. I often get curious looks from visitors to my office as to what is this strange object and sheet music stand  doing in my office 

       Last year I passed the Trinity Grade 8 performance exam. My job in Calcutta gave me long weekends, although not much privacy in office to practice at lunchtime. My instructor (Biplab Singh Rajput) in Calcutta was a sincere sort. He provoked me into investing a lot more time into practice and eventually perfecting the pieces. Although I don't think I can play all that well, I have a certificate to show that I have the highest grade certification in Classical guitar from the reputed Trinity college of London. Now I practice only to be worthy of that certificate.  And that certificate is worth more than any academic certificate I have.....

One card

    Talking of Government policies in these fractured times can invite trouble in Babudom. In the last few years things have changed…. For better in some respects; for worse in some other. For one, individuals have been weaponised with broadcast/publishing powers with the spread of camera phones and internet. It takes just a millisecond to view natural disasters, fires, tragedies, movie stars in airports etc in the public domain.

    The Home Minister has floated the idea of a single multi-purpose card for all Indians. All identity documents rolled into one; Aadhaar, driving licence, PAN, voter ID, ration card etc. The 2021 census is expected to be conducted paperless. Let us examine the proposal, shorn of its’ political overtones.

   The Govt is already pushing a scheme for a ration card which can be used to draw rations from anywhere in the country. Many State Govts are already on board in this exercise while some states have not joined the scheme. This is certainly a laudable initiative since truly deserving migrant labour in various states will be able to draw rations in their place of work, without changing their domicile status.

   Do we need a single card? Will it serve any purpose? Will it make life easier for individuals to go about their daily lives? Well, it depends on how it is conceived and handled. The Aadhaar was conceived as a welfare initiative, to ensure that identibeneficiaries are de-duplicated and to prevent pilferage of govt resources to ghost beneficiaries. A process which has resulted in lining the pockets of bureaucrats and middlemen all these years. The govt has discovered many more uses for Aadhaar by linking it to PAN no:s, for allotment of LPG fuel and in some states for issue of rations. The one measure which has been lacking in the rollout of Aadhaar was the absence of standalone machines in public offices which would enable identification of individuals

   Now let us come to the core  issue. Would you like to carry one card in your wallet which would not only identify you but also give the entire gamut of services needed for various things like travel, ration etc ?  Might sound like a good idea but then in these times of data privacy issues and identity thefts, it could pose several other problems. India doesn’t have a data privacy law. It is still a work in progress. The single card, while making things easier for the ordinary citizen, could also raise concerns regarding futuristic threats which are still in the realm of the unknown.

   But let us not dismiss the idea straightaway. This blogger believes that there is some merit in seamless integration of data contained in various documents. While keeping the documents per se separate, it is yet a great idea to link all the documents to Aadhaar number and enable citizens to change their address on a single window system which would then automatically update the information in the backend database of all other documents like driving licence, PAN, ration card, passport etc. This would automatically obviate the need to carry out address change for migrant labour (Central Govt employees like me are also no different from migrant labour in that we end up living in many places in India; although with a lot of help from the Govt.)

    There was a time not long ago when share certificates were in physical form and any change in address had to be intimated separately to the registrar of each company. Some companies would fail to update details, resulting in loss of dividend, intimations etc. With the advent of dematerialization and trading portals, it has become a distant memory. We have to incorporate change in address or Bank account number only once and it is updated everywhere else. One more revolution of a similar kind is required for seamless updating of data of various documents which are issued to citizens by diverse authorities. These documents are issued by many central and state govt departments and would require coordination of the highest order. It remains to be seen how feasible it is to bring them all under one common platform to trigger this change which is sure to benefit the common citizen

The Bibliophile

 

I don’t know whether I should be grateful that I work in the Central Govt. of the Indian Republic. Several of my good friends who work in the State Govt, Armed forces and academia have hung up their boots and are leading a life of leisure. I continue to slog in a job not of my liking. I’m in Calcutta now, a city that I always loved to live in. The job fails to interest me much but I still have a good three and a half years of this drudgery to undergo before I retire from work.

    A nice way to look me up in Google would be to input the string" bald bureaucrat, with an unexplained interest in Roadside barbers, fountain pens, Carnatic music and Classical Guitar".....Well, that would just about describe me adequately. My reading has taken a huge plunge. I blame it on the quiet invasion of social media. That urge to read links sent by well meaning friends, to reply to messages etc have overtaken my life. I have no excuses for this long break from the blog. Writing is something that grows on you initially with inspiration, later with practice. I lost the urge to write. In the humdrum at workplace, I get to worry about procedural inanities, turf wars and ego hassles. I was persuaded to re-start this blog because I saw a longish note in Facebook written by a student called Ashley, on my bibliophile-friend Professor Nagesh who retired recently.  https://www.facebook.com/ajax/sharer/?s=22&appid=25554907596&id=10156216125188366&p[0]=668523365&p[1]=10156216125293366&sharer_type=all_modes&av=1356305017

                    I met Nagesh in the late 1980s through a circle of young Bank-Officers staying in lodging houses in and around Ernakulam town where we both worked. Nagesh lived alone in a big house in the heart of the city which belonged to his Mom’s family (His late Mom, a wonderful lady, was a Professor of Malayalam in a College in Calicut). I lived in a lodging house called Keerthi Mahal in Jew Street, Ernakulam. We both hated our jobs. We were working as Bank Officers, although in different public sector  banks. We were both from the category of Probationary Officers, freshly minted from college and directly recruited to Officer cadre, without the drudgery of working as clerks for several years. Having been para-dropped into the bank branches, we were struggling with our jobs. The job gave a certain dignity in the midst of much unemployment. Liberalization was still some time away and the software revolution yet to take place.

                      I really don’t know if Nagesh aspired to become a civil servant as Ashley seemed to think. I never asked him that. But he helped me a lot with my reading on India for the UPSC interview (for which I appeared twice with not so encouraging results). But he was more well-read and knowledgeable than the many civil servants I came across in my uneventful life. It is true that he won a national Quiz contest. It wasn’t conducted by Sidhartha Basu but he represented his Bank (I think, my memory plays tricks with me nowadays) in Discover India Quiz and won a trip to any location in India with 5-star hotel stay thrown in. It is a hilarious story how he went about en-cashing that prize and I played a small part in it. I remember trying to handle the Bureaucracy in the tourism department through my friends’ circle to hold them to their promise. It was with great difficulty that the prize was realized. Not to mention the troubles he had when he landed in the hotel (with his nephew along) and the hotel pleaded ignorance about his booking.  But he had his moment in the sun with that quiz and a lot of people knew him as that guy who won the national quiz on TV!!

      Eventually I drifted into Civil Services and he threw away his bank job to join Devagiri college in Calicut as a Lecturer in English. We both took a big hit on our pay packets, he a greater one. Somewhere along the way we lost touch with each other. He remained single, while I married a batch-mate from the Civil Services. I traversed the country on many transfers while he remained rooted to his small town and his teaching career, research and reading. I am not surprised that he asked his student whether he shares the same values with the girl he proposes to marry. That’s just our generation’s thinking. The Missus, also a good reader, is impressed with his range of reading.           

      We rediscovered each other’s coordinates when I visited Calicut long back and met a relative who was teaching in Devagiri college as a temporary lecturer. She put me on to him. It was nice catching up and we maintained contact ever since. I visited his home and was awe-struck by his library which overflowed with books. He took me around various eating joints in Calicut. He, a vegetarian, would peck at his food while I’d sample the veritable feasts laid before me. Every year we gift each other books on our birthdays. That’s probably a much tougher task for me. He invariably finds something interesting for me to read. While I’d be left guessing whether he already owns or have read the book I wish to gift him.

   Nagesh's range of reading was vast. He could name the editor of Punch from the 1950s and could quote from his works. While my tastes were eclectic (with some British crime fiction, Malayalam literature, penguin classics and some soft porn) his range was vast apart from English literature, in which he specialized. A conversation with him could be quite revealing. One could come away feeling that we are dummies and have still a long way to go to get anywhere near that erudition. Also, his modesty strikes you as very unusual for a man so well-read….. The last time we met at his home, I asked him what he thought of Arundhati Roy’s latest work (which I hadn’t read. I’ve started finding her a bit distasteful after she went politically bombastic). He then went on to give a 15 minute-long insight into the book. I was flabbergasted at his analysis. No critique could be as succinct and as illuminating. At the end of it, I had only one thing to say. He should write. I mean really sit down and pen his thoughts. 

    I still remember something he told me about our common avarice to buy books and let them rest near the bedside without reading. It is about an actress who put on a lot of weight. When someone asked her why.... she said honestly that it is all about a childhood with very little food on the family table. Hence the tendency to gorge on whatever is laid in front of her. He lived in small towns with little access to books.   There was nothing much on TV when he grew up nor was there social media. Acquiring books was a gargantuan task since there wasn't Amazon or Flipkart in those days. He maybe the last of the voracious readers from that generation......a true Bibliophile.

Jinnah

It was sometime in the summer of 2009 that I read Stanley Wolpert’s work “Jinnah of Pakistan”.  It was a work that gave insights into the mind of a man whose name is much sullied in India. At the end of the reading I came away thinking here is a man, much misunderstood. From someone who stood against the communalization of Indian politics, the transformation to Muslim India’s apostle was a journey of many twists and turns. In the end the fight turned to an intense one for a separate state for Indian Muslims. And the tragedy of Pakistan was that he didn’t live long enough to lay down the ideals of a nation and live by it, a nation established as a homeland for Muslims where they could live with dignity.  That book is not easily available in India. And I read somewhere that it is not so easily available in Pakistan too, for reasons not clear.

          I bought a very information rich book called “Creating a New Medina” by Venkat Dhulipalia. This book contains the fight for UP in the hinterland of the United Province (as the UP was called then) and the various debates on the creation of Pakistan, culled from research material, from varied sources. While Jinnah visualised a homeland for Indian Muslims, there was also an alternate narrative of an Islamic State. It was Shabir Ahmed Usmani the cleric who visualized Pakistan as a new Medina. I read this book off and on, drawing from the rich sources and getting a sense of the time. It still lies near the bedside for an occasional flip, over some aspect of the partition debate.

    But the book that captivated me in recent times was “Mr and Mrs Jinnah” by Sheela Reddy. Jinnah’s stormy marriage to Rutttie Petit, daughter of a rich Parsi Industrialist in Bombay, 24 years younger to him. A marriage that created unrest in Bombay society and set tongues wagging. Jinnah was a man of steely character. He worked hard at his lawyer briefs and also at building his political career. While the book centres on the stormy marriage with Ruttie, one couldn’t escape the feeling that Jinnah's life would have charted a different course if his peers had been less patronising and ready to concede political space. The other central character that pervades the marriage of Jinnah and Ruttie like a bright silvery cloud is Sarojini Naidu and her children. It was an unusual friendship, that of Sarojini with Jinnah and Ruttie. She was the friend who understood Jinnah only too well, the conscience keeper of his marriage, the family Ruttie had, after her own banished her. Ruttie’s is a sad story, for it was her fickle mind, moony notions of love and marriage and a life of luxury that often led the reader to think of Jinnah as the tragic character, in personal life and by extension, his hardened political positions that characterised his life.

            Reading about his life from various sources, one can't escape the feeling that he might have retained his commitment to the nationalist cause and continued to play the role of Hindu-Muslim unity in undivided India - if only history had taken different turns, leaders had exercised restraint, Congress had accommodated Muslim League in the power sharing formula .....But things, as they turned out, were not so simple. More than a leadership tussle, it was the feeling of alienation from the Hindu mainstream that manifested in many ways and resulted in his marginalization, first from the Home Rule League and later, the Congress itself that drove him in search of his political constituency.

         In the end, one comes away thinking that the loss of Ruttie hardened Jinnah, he was never the same person. Or was it the marginalisation by Congress that hardened him? Was it Ruttie, with her wayward life and tragic death, that made his life an emotional roller-coaster, ending it in a steely and determined position on muslim statehood? At the outset one might think of Ruttie and Jinnah were as  different as two persons can be. The marriage was clearly dying, and in a strange way, it reflected on his politics. While Ayesha Jalal's political analysis terms Pakistan as a political bargaining tool which Jinnah himself never imagined would come true, Dhulipalia analyses the dynamics of the demand of nationhood that took a life of its' own.... at a terrible price, of course. But Sheela Reddy's book gives a valuable insight into the man, shorn of his lawyer-politician veneer, a man who fell in love and stood firm in the face of adversities in life. Let that portrait hang in the University hall.... he is as much ours as he is theirs

The Masseur who reads

       I was waiting for my turn at the Ayurveda massage centre....No, this is not some seedy place where bikini clad babes would go to work on your body. It is bang in the middle of the city, a huge place that resembles an abandoned house, with consultation facilities and a medical dispensary. The thought of stripping down to underclothes in front of strangers and displaying an old creaky body ravaged by time, is not really a pleasant one. Here two men go to work on your body in a dark room, with copious amounts of hot oil, pressing hard on joints and synchronized pounding of your back...You feel so defenceless

   While I was waiting my turn, a man walks in carrying a few Malayalam books. They are handed over at the counter and some other books are returned to him. I was curious and asked what is going on. He said he is a travelling librarian and has come to issue books. The books were of a certain kind which are not read by young adults or lazy housewives, in search of instant gratification. I was then curious to know who is the reader in the Ayurveda Centre. Apparently the reader was busy at work and had given the books that he had borrowed last month at the counter to be returned. I asked the travelling librarian how does it work? He explained that the requests for books can be placed online and it is supplied once a month.

   I took down the details of the travelling librarian. (I later enrolled myself in this library too) Then I went in for the massage. Two men were inside in a dark room and I was asked to take down my clothes and lie flat on my stomach while two pairs of hands pounded my weary body with oil.  I asked who is the reader between the two? A short bearded young man admitted he is the reader. I appreciated his tastes in literature while admitting that I haven't done any serious reading in Malayalam in ages. 

    We got chatting. While my reading in Malayalam was largely limited to authors of 60s to 80s, (the golden period as one would like to say for any literature) his range was vast. He suggested many new writers who, he thinks, I ought to check out. Over the next few months during my visits, he introduced me to many new age writers in Malayalam. V J James, T D Ramakrishnan, A S Priya, K R Meera, Subash Chandran and many others. I either borrowed or bought books of these authors. I also  discovered to my astonishment that he has read many world classics also in the translated Malayalam versions. Kazantzakis, Kafka, Orhan Pamuk, Sartre... you name it and he has read it. (Along with Chetan Bhagat and Shobha De for good measure) I was looking forward to these visits which combined body cure with adrenaline for the brain. I saw a little bit of myself in him, from my school days, thirsting for books, reading whatever I can lay my hands on 

    He told me that he studied only  up to 12th Grade from Thodupuzha, his hometown. Circumstances at the home prompted him to learn a skill and earn a living. Hence he turned to Ayurvedic massage which puts bread on the table. He said he writes in his spare time and is toying with the idea of a movie script. I asked him to let me see a sample of his writing. He shyly brushed off my suggestion. I started carrying some books from my personal library for him to read. These were promptly returned on my next visit. I invited him home to check out my library...

     Over the past few months I became irregular at the Ayurveda centre. The work front got tough, with very few holidays and a transfer to Kolkata looming in the horizon. I went there last month, eager to listen to some suggestions on the latest works in literature while getting a hot oil massage. Unfortunately, I was told that he had left this job a few months back.

     I took the news with great disappointment. An Ayurveda massage clinic is the most unlikely place where one could meet a discerning reader and have a cerebral discussion. I don't meet readers at the workplace. Increasingly, it has become a place for disgruntled souls, looking forward to an evening of drinks and party games. Life's vagaries dealt him a wild card, but I hope to see him one day as a successful novelist or a screenplay writer.....Although I have no friends in the literary world, I wish I could do something to get him a break in life. I fervently hope for his success....